


Last Snowfall

by tinsnip



Category: Deep Dish Nine - Fandom, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Alternate Universe, Deep Dish Nine, M/M, Snow, finding beauty in unexpected places, gratitude, looking ahead, pretenses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-26
Updated: 2013-09-26
Packaged: 2017-12-27 16:00:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/980860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinsnip/pseuds/tinsnip
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elim Garak hates the winter. Julian Bashir loves it. As always, Elim finds himself swayed.</p><p>This is set in the alternate universe of <a href="http://deep-dish-nine.tumblr.com/">Deep Dish Nine</a>. This story uses Lady Yate-Xel's versions of Elim Garak and Julian Bashir, with the occasional tinsnip twist. It is not part of their "canon"; it's just an idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Snowfall

**Author's Note:**

> The backbone for this piece is Vienna Teng's ["The Last Snowfall"](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/album/inland-territory/id380414677), which is lovely and melancholy and very wintery indeed. I hate the winter. But this song makes me wish it would snow. If you like that feeling and you like this fic, please buy the song.
> 
> Thanks again to swamp-spirit from tumblr, who turned me on to Vienna Teng in the first place. What wonderful damage you've done!

_if this were the last snowfall_  
 _no more haloes on evergreens_  
 _if this were my last glimpse of winter_  
 _how would these eyes see?_

* * *

He’d never thought he’d learn to love the winter.

Cardassia was a warm country, humid and hot, mostly desert, but with the occasional blindingly lush flash of green. The climate was very much the same all year ‘round, with little temperature variation between seasons; only the sudden furious monsoons of the rainy season brought change to the weather.

He’d been born and raised there, he’d been shaped and molded there, and Cardassia’s warmth had become a sort of embrace for him. When he’d had nothing else to hold on to, he’d always been able to step outside, to open his hands and turn his face up to the sun.

No matter the season, in Cardassia the ground was always warm, the plants rooted and strong and green. On those days when it had felt like his fingers had been meant for nothing but unmaking, he’d been able to slide them into warm earth, to gently cradle a bulb or a blossom, to twine a vine around its mates for support. He’d always had a garden, even if it was a tiny thing; there had always been a time and place for things to grow.

But here and now, it was so cold _all the time—_

Well, no, that was an exaggeration, and he knew it. The climate here was actually quite warm compared to the northern reaches of the Federation, home to Andor and its frozen mountains. Down here, near the Bajoran border, in this little semi-desert state, the sun shone, the grass was green, the trees flashed into leafy growth—

For six months, and then it was fall, and then _winter_ , and he’d never been so cold, even Romulus was never this cold.

He could still remember his first blizzard, and how he’d stood on his bed and gaped out his basement window as the thick flakes had piled up until no light could get in at all. He’d been curious, almost childishly excited, and he’d left his apartment and half-jogged up the stairs to the lobby to get a better look. The world had been white, everything covered, streetlamps obscured by the whirl of snow, and when he’d opened the door and leaned out, wind had tugged at him and wet snow had spattered his hair and he’d laughed—

The next day, the snow had still been there. He’d somehow expected it to vanish overnight, like a miracle, unable to exist in the light of the sun. Instead, it had clung to his shoes and soaked his socks as he’d slogged his way to the shop. He’d spent the first twenty minutes after opening drinking tea, hot as he could stand it, and thinking sour thoughts.

The next day, the snow had still been there.

And the day after that. And after that, and after that…

Winter was long here, unimaginably long, November to April, and nothing grew. The ground was cold and dead, when it was even visible. The trees were bare, rattling naked limbs against a grey sky. Some days he couldn’t even see the sun, and he could not imagine that he’d once come from a place where he could turn his face up and feel its caress against his skin.

There was no room for a garden here. He didn’t even have a space for a window-box. He’d made do with one or two plants, placed where they’d catch the light and tended carefully, but they had drooped in the dim half-light of his apartment, and his fingers hadn’t been able to weave life back into them. Eventually he had abandoned it as a bad effort, and dug himself in to wait for spring.

It had come, finally, as he’d known it would, but he’d been too tired to welcome it, too sluggish and sad from unending chill to understand what one warm day could mean. When he’d seen green shoots pushing up from the soil, he’d only half understood what they portended. And when the world had finally shrugged and fully given herself over to spring, all pink blossoms and sweet smells and singing birds, all he’d been able to think was that soon enough, it would all be gone again.

He couldn’t enjoy the summer. He didn’t want to be seduced by pretense. What lay beneath was cold and dark. He’d seen it, and he wouldn’t forget, and all spring meant was that now he needed to prepare for the next winter.

But Julian… Julian liked the winter.

* * *

_if this were the last slow curling_  
 _of your fingers in my palm_  
 _if this were the last i felt you breathing_  
 _how would i carry on?_

* * *

When they’d first met, it had been autumn, and he’d looked around him with guarded eyes, ready for cold rain and brisk wind to slip sideways into sleet and snow and slide him into darkness.

Instead, he’d seen green.

As the year had faded on, as the trees had shed their leaves and curled into themselves, hearts warm deep within them; as the grass had faded to brown, and the plants had shrivelled and died, he still kept finding green.

Julian’s eyes, laughing at him, delighted with him, close to his own, across the room, in a photo, in a sketch, green, green, green—

Ridiculous, really, that one man’s eyes, one man’s smile, could make him want to close his eyes and open his hands as if touched by sun. The reality of winter was not something so easily ignored, and to cast aside his coat, to loosen his scarf, would certainly only bring him trouble.

And yet he’d edged closer and closer to that warmth, that flash of green life. He’d found himself warmer and warmer every day, muscles loosening, shoulders relaxing, opening up, shutting his eyes—

And Julian had laughed, and had pulled him in, and had dragged him _out_ :

Out of his well-defended apartment, shored up with tea and blankets and thermostat set to full—

Out to a hike in the snow, his new winter boots crunching through the glistening white crust—

Out to ice-skate, and Julian had been clumsy, and so had he, but they’d managed somehow, and laughed like idiots, and rewarded themselves with hot chocolate—

Out to an actual snow ball fight, and the less said about _that,_ the better—

And Julian had delighted in it, in all of it. Julian puffed big glistening misty breaths, crunched puddles beneath his boots, pointed out lovely patterns of frost and pretty shapes of snow and how the ice spangled the fence, right _there, look,_ Elim, and suddenly it had been impossible to miss.

There was a beauty to winter that he’d never seen. It was a little like the desert, really. It was spare and dangerous and uncaring, but it also had a simple loveliness that moved him, that set him to thinking of flowing lines and soft slopes and fabric spilling over in a gentle fall. It made him wonder, and think.

He’d tried to explain it to Julian, and Julian had tilted his head, thoughtful, and taken him out for a walk in the moonlight along the boulevard. As cars had ghosted along beside them, the sound of their tires a soft susurrus in snow, Julian had slipped a hand into one of his mittens, curling his fingers lightly against his palm. He’d looked at Julian, wondering; Julian had looked back, knowing.

He’d almost regretted the coming of spring.

* * *

_this is not the last snowfall_  
 _not our last embrace_  
 _but if i were that kind of grateful_  
 _what would i try to say?_

* * *

The years had spun by so quickly. Sometimes it seemed like decades since he left Cardassia. Sometimes it seemed like no time at all.

Things were changing, as they always did.

Julian’s residency was almost complete; soon he’d be offered a selection of places to practice, and it was almost certain that none of them would be here. They had talked about it, and about what would happen. He wasn’t as worried about it as he’d thought he might be, mostly because of how Julian looked at him when they talked about it:  calm, and content, and just a hint of a smile. It was the look that warmed him most; it was the one that reminded him most of the sun of home.

His thoughts were turning more and more towards that sun, these days. Things were changing in Cardassia, too. Governments had been overthrown, and a new democracy was pushing its way out of the soil. It was an uncertain, tentative thing, more of a shoot than anything else, poking its head into the sunlight, but Cardassia was sometimes kind to growing things, and he had his hopes.

And what that small green growing thing promised, oh…

A forgiveness of sins. A pardon for old wrongs. A slate wiped clean.

A chance to stand in the sun again, to leave behind the winter’s chill forever—

Once upon a time he would have jumped at it, would have abandoned his half-hearted attempt at building a life here without a second thought.

It was confusing, though. Somewhere along the way, half-hearted had become whole-hearted. Abandoning this life felt rather like abandoning half of himself. To leave behind the first and last snowfalls of winter, to return to a land where winter simply did not exist: wasn’t that simply more pretense?

He wanted to go so desperately—but if he did, would he then be giving up any claim to what he had now? Would it be a surrender, a way of admitting that he could never truly be happy here?

That didn’t feel true.

Perhaps the key was to reframe the situation.

When fall came and the days collapsed into themselves, twilight coming sooner and sooner and the nights bringing chill, a gardener had to dig up the most vulnerable bulbs from the garden, removing them from the earth that sustained them. If he did not, the bulbs would die, frozen in the lifeless soil.

Digging up the bulbs was not an admission of defeat, or a surrender to winter.

It was a firm fixation on spring’s inevitable arrival, and the time when once again the bulbs could be nestled into warm ground, there to joyfully uncoil into green life.

Here and now, Julian nodded at him, smiling, and ran his fingers along his jawline, and he was grateful for the quiet certainty that time apart would not defeat them.   

This would not be their last winter. But it would also not be their last spring.

He would go to Cardassia, and Julian would not go with him.

But the seasons would cycle ceaselessly, and if it was cared for carefully, what they had would bloom again.

* * *

_\-- vienna teng, “the last snowfall”_


End file.
